


the thing about falling

by foundCarcosa



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 09:12:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14638700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: The cosmos holds many mysteries. Falling off the Bifröst might bring you face to face with one. #TeamSadboys #TeamSonsOfNone





	the thing about falling

**Author's Note:**

> This is... an experiment, honestly. I basically stole Mordred from SK since SK wasn't doing anything with him, and this particular ship is actually my fiancée's fault.
> 
> Some of the stuff going on here was a product of a roleplay I did with arielshepard at tumblr that kind of just... stuck.
> 
> The word "N'gof'n" is cobbled-together R'lyehian for "child of death/darkness" (both, really).
> 
> I think that covers everything. Maybe. Like I said, this IS an experiment. :p

_There was a funny thing about falling. When you can anticipate a landing, you think about nothing but that. You think about how much it will hurt, about what parts of you will break, about how it will feel to die -- or whether you'll feel it at all._

_When you don't anticipate a landing, because there was never one in sight, you stop thinking at all.  
You become thought-less, then weightless, then formless. You forget you are Loki, Laufeyson, Odinson, no-one's-son. You forget the battle that brought you to this point, and the pain and fury and alienation that pushed you off the precipice. You forget to marvel at the vastness of the space you are falling through, the infinite ocean of form and void that envelops you._

_And when you do land, the pain of remembering is almost as bad as the physical impact._

* * *

Loki comes back to consciousness screaming, his every nerve ending aflame.

"That's not necessary," an irritated voice responds from a direction Loki can only vaguely interpret as above him. He's shocked into relative silence, his breath hissing between clenched teeth.

"Oh, do you understand me? You did look human, but I wasn't sure, considering how much of you was... broken." The voice titters. "You reassemble well. Most humans don't. Especially not here. You should have more eyes. Sometimes I do."

The pain is lessening. Breathing is marginally easier, and Loki can feel other things aside from blinding agony -- like the slick, hard surface under his shoulder blades and buttocks and heels. If he concentrates, he can feel the other boundaries of his humanoid form. Full of thought, full of weight, full of form. Loki, Laufeyson, Odinson, no-one's-son.

He opens his eyes.

"Well, at least we don't have the same eye colour," Loki's mirror image says glibly. "In that case, one of us would have had to change."

As the doppelgänger wiggles a spidery leg near Loki's eyes threateningly, Loki swiftly tallies the ways in which this was not his mirror image. The first tally mark went to the spider legs, balancing a bulbous black spider abdomen -- second tally mark -- upon which was perched a slender human torso where the cephalothorax should have been. But that slender human torso could very well have been Loki's, and the narrow, smirking face above it with its curtain of lank black hair was Loki's through and through -- save for the brilliant blue eyes, one of which sported a vacuous flexing pupil that expanded to fill the whole eye and contracted to a pinpoint seemingly at whim.

"What the fuck is this?" Loki hisses in pained Asgardian.

"Oh-- one of those." The creature grimaces, shrugs, then replies in effortless Asgardian, "You landed on a balcony in our Tower at an amusingly swift velocity. I took it upon myself to reassemble you. You are welcome."

Loki closed his eyes again, but blessed unconsciousness escaped him. It seemed he would have to deal with this.

"Where am I and what are you?" Neutral questions, expected questions; questions that usually revealed much -- if not in what was said, then in what wasn't said.

"Well, at least you aren't screaming anymore." Loki's strange caretaker seems to approve, taking a casual stroll around the platform that Loki laid upon, as if showing himself off. Loki didn't want to indulge him by watching him move, but he was a magnificent creature, as far as creatures went.

"This is... the last exit for the lost. Or, the first stop for the created. The home of Our Mother, the Emperor of the Crawling Chaos. A Tower. _The_ Tower. The _Darkest_ Tower, one might say." Loki casts about in his cosmic knowledge banks, but he has no frame of reference for this description. Not for the first time, he wonders what exactly he has fallen into, and whether he'll ever get out of it. "Your ka has incredible aim, to point you here from the... lofty heights from which you fell." _Lofty heights_ is said with no small amount of amusement. "As for me," and here he grins sunnily, but on a face like his -- on a face like Loki's -- it just looks rictus-mad, "I'm Mordred."

"Mordred," Loki repeats breathlessly, as he attempts to push himself into a sitting position. He succeeds on the third try, although his body still feels vaguely like ground beef. "Of course. You look like a Mordred."

"I thank thee!" Mordred replies, bowing.

"I was not serious," Loki glowers. "You look like me, atop a spider's body, and I would know why."

"Incorrect. _You,"_ Mordred corrects, a contemptuous glint in his eye, "look like _me."_

They stare at each other for a long, tense moment, Mordred tossing his shoulders back and elongating his neck in an imperious gesture that painfully reminds Loki of his own mannerisms -- before his world folded in on itself and spat him out.

"I like you. You should stay with me," Mordred says, suddenly, the haughtiness gone from his carriage, replaced by a curious and manic cast to his expression.

* * *

It never becomes clear why they look like each other. They simply do. It stops mattering. Mordred is not always a man's torso on a spider's abdomen; sometimes he is simply a man-shaped thing, looking even more remarkably like Loki, although with varying height and varying mannerisms. He seems to be several people at once, when he is a person -- as if he'd learned how to be human without the desire to be a certain human in particular. Sometimes he is a hasty amalgamation of arachnid and humanoid parts. Sometimes he is a spider through and through, of varying size.

It doesn't faze Loki, the shape-shifter. They make a game of it as they get to know each other in the time-removed void that was the dead space around the Tower -- a game of trading forms, of hiding from each other or tripping each other up, of showing each other up through the assumption of increasingly complex shapes.

Mordred -- Mordred Deschain, Black Prince, Reaper Prince, N'gof'n, Doom of the Red and of the White -- once assumed the shape of a stallion, tossing a mane speckled with stars and rearing up on hooves that struck sparks wherever they landed. He laughed when he saw Loki's expression.  
"Oh, I've read of you, Shape-Changer, Trickster, Mother of Monsters," he mocks, but it is a teasing mocking. They speak the same language. "Does this shape please you?"

"All your shapes please me," Loki retorts, smirking triumphantly when Mordred falls tellingly silent.

* * *

"I can't stay here," Loki says, and saying it makes it true.

Mordred, humanoid, presses Loki into the slick black wall with his body. "You can."

"I cannot," Loki asserts in a whisper, holding Mordred's gaze even as Mordred holds his forearm against Loki's throat.

"Mine," Mordred counters, shoving his thigh between Loki's and pressing harder.

"Yours," Loki relents, quieter still as his breath weakens. "Come with me."

Mordred falters, his arm relaxing, and Loki begrudgingly takes the breath. "What?"

"You've been to Earth. I may... need your assistance."

They stare at each other. Loki hisses as Mordred presses him tighter still against the wall, shoving back with his own body. "Would you rather stay in this precious Tower of yours forever? What fun is there in that?"

"You'll leave me," Mordred scowls, swapping his forearm for his hands, digging his nails into the yielding flesh of Loki's neck. Loki lifts his chin and leans into the chokehold, sighing.

"Maybe." Loki grins, licking his lips. "Then you'll just have to hunt me down..."

* * *

They stand on the balcony where Mordred found Loki, fallen and broken, a castoff of a story that had no room for him.

"How...--" Loki stares over the edge of the balcony at formless void, feeling nauseous.

There is a picture in Mordred's mind, of the number zero, of the beginning of a journey. Of a cliff, below which neither land nor sea could be seen. A fool's errand. --They were all fool's errands, in the end.  
A story always began with a fool. Sometimes two.

"Leap," Mordred states, grabbing Loki's hand and jumping.


End file.
